>   But I'd add one (very important, in my opinion) feature to the mix: 
> the ability to easily upgrade whole installations either from source, 
> from binaries or both.  This is difficult, but not impossible; other 
> systems have got it.  And let's face it: upgrading the packages of a 
> system (specially desktops) is a royal PITA nowadays.

A few of other systems that have a good package upgrade system are urpmi, 
yum, up2date, apt-get and apt-rpm. These are all tools above their 
primitive package management tools, rpm or dpkg, which are similar to our 
pkg_install suite.

The reason these good upgrade tools work is because they have a detailed 
database of known possibilities of available binary packages. Soon we will 
have that too once the recent patches to pkg_info get committed.

Once we have that new pkg_info in place we can have the bulk build 
uploaders generate this detailed availability file. Or it can be done 
automatically.

Debian uses a big file with all details in it. While yum uses hundreds or 
thousands of files (per package).

Anyways, once we have this in place, I am assuming that the several tools 
we already have can be extended to use that information for a 
binary-package-only installations and upgrades (and package removals).

Some of the tools that could probably be easily extended include:
 pkgtools/pkg_select or wip/pkg_select
 wip/pkgmanager
 pkgtools/pkg_chk
And I seem to recall that there are a couple more.

(Of course, work on a new or replacement for the package admin tools is 
fine too. On that note, one of the developers has said on several 
occassions that he has one already, but I am not sure how much is done.)


 Jeremy C. Reed